“There is no one I wouldn’t kill for you. No crime I wouldn’t commit or atrocity I wouldn’t instigate if it meant keeping you safe and keeping you mine.”
“I’m not yours,” I told him, more breath than sound.
I hated the way my body defied me in favour of him even in that small way.
He had his hooks in me so deep that they were embedded in my DNA.
“You are,” he said simply, an irrefutable fact. I sucked in a breath through my teeth as he banded a hand across my lower back and snapped my torso forward into his. My curves submitted to his hard lines, and I hated how beautifully we fit.
I bit my lip but didn’t argue because my body betrayed me more readily than my words could ever defend me. I decided a change of topic was a better strategy and pulled out of his hold to give myself needed space to think more clearly. “Did you know Noel was watching me?”
His eyes burned like arctic ice against my skin. “Of course. He’s not a man who lets his prey run loose and free. Unfortunately, I only recently realized how obvious it was that he had been keeping an eye on you…I only needed to ask who he could have used to accomplish such a thing to think to seek out Yana. After all, she has been one of his most powerful tools of trade for a long, long time.”
I wanted to tell him that Noel had been the one to send me fleeing four years ago, that he had beaten me within an inch of my sanity and forced me to run.
But I wouldn’t, not when I didn’t understand why Xan had finally returned to me after all this time.
“Why are you here, Alexander?” I asked him, suddenly so weary that the words felt misshapen and heavy leaving my lips.
His golden brow knotted, and his fury slithered through the car like smoke, thick and carcinogenic. “You can honesty doubt my intentions after everything I’d said to you in the last thirty-six hours?”
“Is there really any doubt that I would?” I countered, my own anger creeping through my exhaustion. “You’ve played me like a yo-yo for years. I have no idea of your real intent. How could I?”
“You once told me you loved me,” he reminded me ruthlessly, suddenly in my space, both hands twined in my hair so my face was pinned against his, nose to nose, eyes nearly crossed as they connected. “And I once promised I would take that from you; your love, your body, and your devotion. I’m a man of my word, Cosima. I’ve come to take what you’ve always wanted to give me.”
“Are you trying to tell me you love me?” I demanded because he was still crafting puzzles with his words and my wary heart needed confirmation.
I would not give in to less than his reciprocity.
He stared at me still, his eyes working beneath his heavy lids, his jaw so taut I worried it was break under the strain.
But he said nothing.
I gripped my hands over his wrists like shackles and forced him tighter to me so he could see the way my eyes glowed, how something inside me wanted to reach out and eat him up entirely. Devour his power and his essence until he was all mine.
“How can I forgive you for everything you’ve ever done if you won’t give me access to your heart? Or the very least your mind? I cannot begin to fathom your motivation over the past few years, and I’m so fucking tired of trying. Why are you here, Xan?”
He was quiet for so long, only the heavy drag of our combined breaths punctuating the gummy silence, that I worried he wouldn’t respond. And then what would I do? I’d come too far to give in to him again without his meeting me halfway.
I needed some tender, vulnerable piece of his soul or else all my fragile, sandcastle dreams of more with this man would crumble irrevocably into dust.
“Please,” I whispered fiercely. “Give me something.”
“I want to give you everything,” he bit out almost before I’d finished speaking, his voice thunder and his eyes flashing like lightning. “I’ve wanted to give you everything since nearly the moment I laid eyes on you so beautiful and brave. Do you know what it is like for a man used to power and spoils when he is helpless to keep and worship the one thing he wants most?”
I didn’t breathe. My heart, for one long, agonizing minute, didn’t beat.
I existed on the precipice of his words, staring into the dark future hoping a soft landing would meet me after the jump.
“If I had a heart, Cosima, I know I would love you with every facet of it,” he breathed with almost violent tenderness, his hands so painful in my hair and his eyes so wonderfully tender on my skin my heart didn’t stand a chance against the contrast. “But I was born without one, and I don’t know if something like that can grow in a man like me. If it could, I know it would for you.”